Shining sand sculpture, which is fleeting but still classic

Sometimes the future runs faster than people think.

As Liu Cixin wrote in "Three-body", human beings are a race with "technological explosion".

The rolling wheel of the times constantly reshapes people’s cognition of technology. Even those who light a single spark can hardly imagine the future wildfire.

Moakley and Eckert, who invented the world’s first general-purpose computer in 1946, could never have predicted that the computing power once obtained by a 170-square-kilometer, 30-ton behemoth can now be easily obtained through cloud computing.

John mccarthy, who put forward the concept of artificial intelligence in 1961, can hardly imagine the scene where AI assistants are active at people’s fingertips today.

Martin cooper, who invented the mobile phone in 1990s, never imagined that the mobile communication tools he developed almost evolved into "external organs" of human beings one day, and immersed in all aspects of life.

Behind these unexpected things, there is a reason: the evolution of the underlying processor.

At the end of the 20th century, Arm CPU did not enter the PC market smoothly, but after turning to the mobile CPU market and changing its business model, it finally came to a bright future and made the mobile Internet prosperous.

At the beginning of the 21st century, x86 CPU, which flourished in the PC processor market, unexpectedly entered the server market with the advantage of cost performance and promoted the development of cloud computing.

In 2010, RISC-V, a new instruction set, was born at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, the first people in China who came into contact with RISC-V were attracted by the open source characteristics of RISC-V, but no one knows how RISC-V will develop in the future.

When Ali Pingtou’s team came into contact with RISC-V in 2014, they were also confused about the prospect of commercialization of this new instruction set. Brother Pingtou, who recognized the open source concept, first verified the technical capability of RISC-V and then proved the high performance of RISC-V.

In the autumn of 2022, Brother Pingtou rushed into the blue ocean of RISC-V energy-efficient CPU with Xuantie C908, and wanted to explore the edge AI market.

This is the key battle of Pingtou, and it will also be an important milestone on the way of RISC-V.

The "accident" that RISC-V will bring to the technology industry lies in the development of RISC-V in recent years.

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Energy-efficient blue ocean,

RISC-V comes up with two killers.

In 2014, RISC-V was only active in the circle of a few technology enthusiasts. “In 2014, we were also somewhat uncertain about whether we should fully invest in RISC-V.Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtou Brother, said, "I am mainly worried about whether this instruction set from academia is capable enough, and I don’t know the advantages of its functions."

In fact, this is also the concern of most people who hold a wait-and-see attitude towards RISC-V. However, under the appeal of the open source concept, with the joint efforts of academic circles and the contributions of technical geeks, RISC-V was introduced into China in 2018 and began to attract attention.

In this year, Pingtou, who came into contact with RISC-V early, also took the lead in developing the first RISC-V CPU-

Xuantie E902, a CPU with low performance and low power consumption. In fact, this is the product of Pingtou Brother’s test of RISC-V. After verifying the low power consumption of RISC-V, Pingtou Brother introduced a Xuantie C910 with a main frequency performance of 2.5GHz a year later, and its ability to make high-performance products with RISC-V was also verified.

The most unforgettable childhood memory of children growing up at the seaside must be the beach, because children who love science fiction films must have piled sand into castles, monsters and so on. However, for us when we were young, although those things piled up with sand brought us infinite joy, they were not works of art and were eventually taken away by the tide. However, Paul Haggard and his wife Rem are different. They take sand sculpture creation as their favorite career.

Paul and Rem are British globetrotters who are very interested in sand sculpture creation. They chose the right sand while walking, and finally created their own sand sculptures, taking into account the natural factors such as sunlight, beautiful color and wind and rain erosion: meandering green dragons, lovely cheetahs, young lions who woke up from sleep, and majestic elephants. These sculptures are great and dazzling. However, due to the large scale of these sculptures, it will take more than half a month even for simple ones, and there should not be even a small mistake, otherwise all previous efforts will be wasted.

Although these shining sand carvings do not last as long as other works of art, we are still amazed by their magnificence. They are still classic.

Having enough confidence in RISC-V, in 2020, Pingtou launched Xuantie C906, which has a more cost advantage. It is also the first commercial CPU in the world whose main frequency exceeds 1GHz. A year later, Brother Pingtou launched Xuantie E907 with improved performance.

marketalwaysEnergy-efficient RISC-V products at Arm Cortex A55 level are always absent.

Cortex A55 is a product launched by Arm as early as 2017. Until 2022, many products, including home appliance SoC and automobile MCU, still use Cortex A55 core. This is enough to show the market demand for energy-efficient CPU, so at the 2022 Yunqi Conference, Pingtou released the latest generation of energy-efficient CPU Xuantie C908.

Since it is a latecomer product, if you want to succeed in the market, you must have more attractive features.

"Xuantie C908 is the most energy-efficient product in Xuantie’s family now."Meng Jianwei introduced that Pingtou promoted technological innovation from the whole CPU architecture and AI energy efficiency.

While having higher performance than Arm A55 of the same class,Xuantie C908′ s higher energy efficiency and native support AI are its two killers in the energy-efficient blue ocean market.

The data shows that the main frequency performance of Xuantie C908 is up to 2.0GHz, which is 40% higher than that of Xuantie C906 and 24% higher than that of Xuantie C906. It natively supports Vector 1.0, and has more than 20% energy efficiency advantage compared with Cortex A55.